


Breathing Under Water

by CupidStrikes



Series: Sheith Week 2016 [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blood, Disassociation, Forehead Touching, Injury, M/M, Sheithweek 2016, derealisation, mentions of panic and anxiety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-10-26
Packaged: 2018-08-23 23:37:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8347249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CupidStrikes/pseuds/CupidStrikes
Summary: Shiro has no way to know how much time he has lost inside his own head, but Shiro can't bring himself to care. If they have already docked in Zarkon's main fleet he's sure it won't matter anyway.





	1. Breathing Under Water

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaand here we are at Sheith Week. Part 1 - Hurt/Comfort (har har har, my lifebood), it was had to decide on a theme but Day 1 and 2 will be a two-parter, so buckle up.
> 
> Lyrics are from Feathers by Electric President.

Breathing Under Water

 

 _I'll follow you down any rabbit hole_  
_Come find me when I sleep_  
_And tie anchors 'round my feet._

 

“Keith, if I don't make it out of here-”

 

“Shiro-”

 

The chains hold fast even as Keith tugs intermittently at where the thick metal disappears into the walls.

 

Over the grind of the engines Shiro hears Keith growl. Curse. The clatter of metal on metal almost fades familiar into the background when it stops completely, and Shiro is aware of Keith slumping, just barely, but he doesn't move.

 

There are cameras in the pod. The knowledge comes unbidden from a fuzzy corner of his mind, the ones that dangles half-memories and shadows that linger in his peripheral vision, but Shiro knows this to be true, and he trusts it to be true as he holds sleeping-still with his back pressed against his bound arms and the wall. It's not comfortable, but Shiro has known tenfold worse and he can deal.

 

He moves his lips, slight, and tilting his chin to his chest. The movement is practised, and Shiro knows he'll remember, later, and he'll regret stirring the still waters of his memory so much, but for now he braces a hand against the shore and plunges a hand deep in.

 

“Keith.”

 

The short hairs at the back of Shiro's neck shift, and he feels perspiration slip down his back between his shoulder blades. Focusses on that one bead of liquid as it traces down the knobs of his spine, heavy against his hyper-sensitive skin, and when he closes his eyes in a blink, his memories shift beneath the still-surface and it feels like fingers on him. Like a hand, and hair wisping over his shoulders, a presence over him and the roar of a crowd that ripples down to a whisper in his ear. Ripples down to _Champion_.

 

“Keith.”

 

Shiro repeats the name. Tastes it in his mouth and pulls himself back into the present. When he opens his eyes the room is still dim-purple and he feels desperately sick. He swallows, the movement pricking pain all the way down his throat, but it's enough, and he continues. Keith's eyes are on him, he knows without moving, muscles tensing up for fight or flight. The room lurches to one side and Shiro sucks in a breath slowly. Holds it for One. Two. Three. Exhales on the fourth, the sound too-loud even against the artificial din around them, and though he opens his mouth again to speak, Keith cuts him off with five words that twist into Shiro's gut.

 

“They're taking us to Zarkon.”

 

Shiro's neck breath whistles out of him, hitching off at the end as he aborts the motion and he shifts in the chains despite himself, curling his knees up to his chest so that he can rest his forehead on them. He closes his eyes tight enough for the memory of light to burst across the backs of his eyelids until he almost convinces himself he can see the whites and blues of the Castle of Lions.

 

The faint thrum and vibrations from the engines have stopped, and Shiro is vaguely aware of silence settling over him, a tangible weight, and he doesn't move.

 

Doesn't move.

 

Someone might be calling his name, but the sound is distant, distorted, and he's sure it's a memory, and he doesn't move. He's sure that he can't even if he tried, and he needs to save his energy. The chains won't give, knows this, and knows the weight around his wrists, around his throat, dragging his chin down to his chest, and he chokes around it as it pulls tight and his throat closes up-

 

Pain blossoms out from his side, and Shiro gasps as his eyes open and for several seconds he sees only blurred shadow. There is a weight against his side that wasn't there before and he lets himself rest into it, breathes in slowly through his nose and around the lingering scent of blood and the burn-metal-plasma scent he has come to associate with _Galra_ , he smells something else; he smells the faint tang of sweat, sandalwood, desert dust and artificial soap from the Garrison laundry rooms and-

 

“Keith?”

 

The weight beside him shifts, and when Shiro opens his eyes again he focusses a little faster and Keith is looking back at him and the shift unbalances him for a moment.

 

“Where did you go?”

 

Shiro doesn't have an answer, but when he shakes his head Keith lets it lie, and Shiro closes his eyes again. Bites the inside of his cheek and lets the pain keep him there.

 

“We stopped a bit ago. I don't know what's happening now.”

 

There is a pause, and Shiro takes it, uses the silence and Keith's commentary to try and fill in the gaps. He has no way to know how much time he has lost inside his own head, but Shiro can't bring himself to care. If they have already docked in Zarkon's main fleet he's sure it won't matter anyway. He doesn't remember how they came to be here, and he can't trust his memory when he tries; flashes of what could be truth or fiction, and it feels like thinking through thick mist, enough that when Shiro wrenches himself out of it he feels physically drained, and he thinks Keith might have made a noise when he slumps sideways but he's not sure and he doesn't ask.

 

Keith doesn't comment. Shiro feels himself being nudged upright again and then the weight on his temple is back, but it's one-sided and soft, and when he leans into it, just a little, he sees the corner of Keith's mouth curl upwards and, trick of the light or not, Shiro holds onto it tight and keeps his eyes open as the lights brightened and beyond their metal prison he hears the clatter of Galratech soldiers and he knows they have run out of time,, that they had been out of time from the start, and Shiro knows this for a fact.

 

 

* * *

 

Being cold is familiar to Keith.

 

Years of third- and fourth-hand clothes, living in drafty rooms in run-down houses, and his shack in the desert that let the wind and the sand in, and now space, with its infinite blackness and only a handful of solar systems, and it's almost like breathing. He focusses on this and lets the heat seep out of him in waves. Every sensation become knifepoint sharp and Keith grounds himself, keeps his eyes open and on Shiro. Keith managed to hold onto consciousness a little longer during their capture and he can still see with stunning clarity the moment where Shiro turned near feral with desperation. There is a red stain down Shiro's right arm and right side, stark against the white of his armour, but Keith's no longer sure if it's human or Galra blood. From this distance he can't even tell if Shiro is conscious.

 

He tries again to move closer, but the chains hold fast; each link is as thick as one of his fingers and they glimmer faintly purple in the low light, enough for Keith to wonder if they're not magical too. It's a futile distraction, and Keith feels frustration bubble beneath his skin like a million little insects, his skin almost itching with sensation and he suppresses a shiver just barely. He tries to heed Shiro's advice, mouthing the words to himself and staring at a point on the opposite wall until the outline of it stays in his vision even as he blinks.

 

It's useless.

 

Keith braces a foot against the floor, yanks at the chains again, and it's tight enough for him to feel the bones in his shoulder grate against the sockets, and he bites back a scream because if dislocating his shoulder is what it takes then-

 

“Keith,”

 

He slumps against the wall, licks the blood off his bitten-lips and turns to Shiro, but Shiro isn't looking at him so much as through him and Keith feels the scream creep right back up his throat again.

 

Shiro's voice is gravelly and low, and Keith listens to him stumble over the syllables in his name once more before he can take no more, and he tells him the truth. He tells Shiro the truth because he can't do this alone and he needs Shiro here now, and not light years away in his memory, and when he barely reacts Keith renews his fumbles with the chains.

 

“Where did you go?”

 

There is no answer, and Keith feels a sense of time return to him, even without a timepiece or the concentration left to measure it.

 

“We stopped a bit ago. I don't know what's happening now.”

 

There are ways to bring Shiro back, but Keith needs to be closer for that to happen.

 

Keith's shoulder gives before the chains do, and he's falling, lands on his arm and he blacks out just briefly from the pain, wakes again with it, and lets his knees guide him the distance, scant now with his arms free, to Shiro. He slumps against Shiro's side and lets his eyes close as his heart jitters against his rib cage. Keith breathes through the pain and forces his body to relax and release the urge to curl around hid injury like a wounded animal.

 

Extreme and sudden pain can send the human body into cardiac arrest. The fact comes to Keith's mind unbidden, and he somehow knows it to be true even if he can't remember where he heard it.

 

He feels Shiro lean into him, sucks in a slow breath as it jostles his arm, but it doesn't matter because Shiro is looking at him, focussing, and Keith recognises with a lurch that sends his heart jacknifing right up his throat that they are no longer moving.

 

They have arrived.

 

Keith stills his breathing and matches Shiro's after a few beats, makes sure that Shiro can feel him as he slows it down. Their chances of getting out as they are – injured, bound, unarmed – are low, but Keith has never put much into probabilities, and he won't let the Druids get their hands on Shiro again.

 

Against him, Shiro stiffens, raises his head for the first time since they woke up, and when Keith listens hard he can hear footsteps approaching, and he leans a little harder against Shiro.

 

“It's okay,”

 

Keith isn't sure if he's trying to reassure Shiro or himself, or if Shiro even hears him, but he says it over and over like a prayer as the single door to their mobile cell opens and Keith scrunches his eyes up against the bright light that greets them as it slides open. He squints back against it, and sees enough to know that there are too many to fight their way out, not without risking serious injury or worse, and Keith won't risk Shiro, not now, when he's half-way present and so frightened.

 

The soldiers release their chains from the wall and they are walked onto the main ship. Keith walks, ignores the pain in his arm, and keeps Shiro in his peripheral vision as he tries to map the corridors. They are as samey as every other Galra ship he has ever visited, and though he had expected no different, Keith feels frustration burn in him all the same. He doesn't have a plan, and that alone is enough to draw out the claws of panic that are beginning to scratch open old wounds on his shoulders and his temples.

 

He lets himself be led, keeps a tight hatch on everything, and bumps his shoulder to Shiro's. He can't see the other man's face aside his clenched jaw and the way his head inclines forward in just enough submission that Keith struggles against screams that feel like acute nausea, and he hopes it's an act as they are taken through another set of doors and into a large room.

 

The only lights are those around the door, and even squinting Keith can only see a foot or two in front of him. They are ordered to kneel, and close as they are, Keith can feel Shiro's thigh against his own and when he turns his head Shiro meets his eyes and smiles, just barely, but Keith catches it and mirrors the expression. It's enough, it's enough and Keith knows this like breathing as Shiro leans in and Keith meets him halfway. He presses his forehead to Shiro's, and the guards might be looking but no one interrupts them.

 

Keith presses his forehead against Shiro's until he knows it'll leave an impression of their skin, and he closes his eyes because it hurts to look at Shiro now, the too-tiny pupils and the the Keith feels his breath fall onto his chin, each exhale too-quick and too shallow.

 

“It's gonna be okay, Shiro,”

 

Keith whispers, the words barely audible over their breathing.

 

“It's okay, it's okay.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Shiro's voice is toned lower than usual, and Keith hears the guards either side of them turn to observe their prisoners' interactions then, but they don't interfere and for a moment Keith is intensely, fervently grateful and he leans in more, lets his body crowd up to Shiro's and curl the other Paladin's body up against his just a little, as much as he can muster as he breathes obedience into the instinct to _protect_.

 

In the darkness, something moves, and the lights come up at last.

 

Beside him, Shiro startles, but Keith barely flickers aside reaffirming his position, and lifting his chin just a fraction as a dark shape approaches from the other side of the room.

 

With the new light, Keith is just about aware that they are in some sort of holding room; a few metal chairs are arranged against a wall and Keith can't help but notice the shackles welded onto them. A monitor on the far wall glows red with the emblem of the Galra Empire, but it all fades into white noise as twin points of yellow and red burn brighter in the lingering darkness of the Galra's form and Keith wonders, absently, if Shiro can feel the way his heart is trying to beat right out of his chest.

 

This is no machine solder, but a flesh and blood Galra, and Keith distantly knows their chances of escape are slimming but he remains where he is, and he surges against the metal hands on his shoulders as across the room red and purple light bursts out of the Galra, and Keith leans himself in front of Shiro even as behind and beside him he feels Shiro bristle and hears his voice snarl a single word like an insult.

 

“ _Sendak._ ”

 


	2. Coming Up For Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The land is sickeningly flat, all the way to the dunes and rocky mountains that rise in the distance, and it fills Keith with a chest-deep, broad-shoulder-wide longing that keeps his eyes on those far-off shapes long after the sun sets and they have ceased to be visible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW this is super late OTL. This what happens when you go out instead of writing and have 3 hours sleep and then proceed to slowly catch the worst cold afterwards. So here is Day 2 - Together/Alone.
> 
> CW for - mental illness stuff (esp. disassociation/derealisation, hallucinations), mentions of character death, and mind control.
> 
> Lyrics are, again, Feathers by Electric President, though this has been written to a strong dose of 'Spirits' by the Strombellas which I think fits Shiro really well....

**Coming Up For Air**

 

_ You know just what I've done and what I've seen _

_ And what I will become if I'm cut free _

_ And you are not to blame for what happens to me. _

  
  


Shiro wakes to darkness and a pressure behind his eyes that makes everything lurch sideways when he tries to sit up.

  
  


He has no way to measure how long he has been here, been unconscious, but Shiro knows that it is too long either way. He breathes through his nose in timed doses and forces himself up onto his knees carefully. His muscles throb with renewed sensation as he uncurls his limbs. He lets the ache flow over him as he moves, feeling out slowly until his fingers touch the wall to the left of him. The metal is unwaveringly cold beneath his fingers and he concentrates on this, and not on the fact that his gloves and – and Shiro shifts ever so lightly to confirm – the rest of his Paladin armour with them. He presses his back up against the wall and lets his body heat seep through the thin material of his undersuit, and the tightly woven mesh must have been compromised because it's not supposed to do this. Shiro moves and feels for the break or tear, his left palm skirting over the material, and the fabric scratches at his left palm and the blackness of the room is closing in on him -

  
  


A hand presses against his mouth on automatic, and Shiro gasps in his next breath, the sound too-loud in the small room and it echoes back, nearly unrecognisable, and when Shiro fights his eyes open he sees a row of faintly glowing dots growing steadily closer and he can feel the exact moment his chest catches and then he's fighting back against his locked-up diaphragm, everything tunneling down to his heartbeat jack-knifing between his ribs until he's sure he can feel it press against where his fingers lie splayed across his chest.

  
  


When he was a child, Shiro had fallen out of the tree that grew in the bottom of his parents' garden. It had only been a short fall, maybe three or four feet at the most, and he had suffered only minor cuts and bruises, but the feeling, though split-second brief and barely perceptible at the time, the feeling of weightless freefall and the air coming in like water, staring up at a too-bright sky through dark branches as his chest heaved against stillness, struggling in and screaming out each little breath he got in and -

  
  


The next breath Shiro manages to get past his dry lips and drier tongue does little to still the way his heart throbs against his ribs, but he opens his eyes anyway and squints against the harsh purple light that is now illuminating the cell. It takes a moment before he realises it is coming from his own arm, and he realises it has melted a deep groove into the wall that glows faintly white even after he has moved his hand away. Shiro holds it in front of him, the glow barely flickering, and as his eyes adjust he sees shapes beyond his personal space, unfamiliar, alien, but not Galra.

  
  


Shiro feels himself relax just a little. Tucks a knee under himself, though he doesn't quiet trust his legs enough to stand, and holds up his left hand in what he hopes is a fairly universal gesture of surrender.

  
  


“Hello.”

  
  


He winces at the low rasp of his voice but holds his gaze steady as much as he can, and when the first alien, one with four off-white glowing eyes (or so Shiro assumes), approaches he leans up a little more. They mutter to themselves in a range of clicks and beeps that chokes a tiny giggle out of Shiro's throat because they sound a little or a lot like R2-D2 and, gods, wasn't that some crazy random happenstance?

  
  


Before it could fully form, the alien shrank back away, the clicking growing faster and more frantic, and Shiro heard one of the other aliens speak – a mix of a guttural language Shiro didn't understand interspersed with Galran, and one word that had become universal in his time here -

  
  


“ _ Champion. _ ”

  
  


Shiro pressed himself tighter against the wall, his arm glimmering even brighter than before as he watched his cellmates shrink away from the increased field of light until he could no longer see them in the shadows, and Shiro feels cold to his very core. It had been six four Earth months and three Earth days since he had escaped, and there had been Champions before, and there would be again so why...

  
  


So why did they remember him so clearly?

  
  


Shiro remembered each opponent he had faced in the ring – the memories blurred and barely there, like catching smoke, but he had known the faces of previous cellmates, those he had seen even fleetingly as they lined up in the wings of the arena, and he knew there were hundreds, maybe thousands more, burned deep into the darkest webs of his memory, and Shiro did not know these aliens. He did not know them, and they knew him just from looking, and he had been gone for long enough to be forgotten by the prisoners, if not Haggar and her druids, but here he was, and Shiro clasped his hand over his mouth as the giggle turned to ash on the back of his tongue and he swallowed back bile even as the residual heat in his metal fingers was uncomfortable against his bare skin.

  
  


Here, back in Galra prison garb and aching all over, it's too-familiar a tableau and Shiro wonders, the thought skirting around the edge of his brain as he tries and fails to keep it peripheral, and as he cascades into the forefront of his mind Shiro feels the floor shift under him and he lands heavily on one side. The cold metal feels good against his cheek and he presses further into it as if the pressure alone might drive out the singular thought that blares across every fibre of his consciousness. One single red alert and so much like  _ pilot error  _ that it turns his stomach and Shiro is objectively aware that he is strangling himself around suppressed retches as he gapes around the words in his head, circling still as consciousness slips from him once more.

  
  


Voltron isn't real.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The human body can go three days without sleep before it begins to turn against itself; before hallucinations and reduction of the senses.

  
  


When Shiro was first declared missing – presumed dead – Keith counted five days without sleep. Five days he barely remembers aside a thick fog in his mind. Snatches of time lost to unconsciousness. He scraped his knee falling down the bottom step on a stairwell he didn't remember even approaching to begin with. When he finally slept it was fitful, punctuated with gasping wakefulness like clock-work every few minutes until dawn light spilling over him from the open curtains was felt like a tangible pain, sharp against his dulled mind and senses.

  
  


The periods of unconsciousness were called 'microsleeps', Wikipedia had told him, and Keith believed it as he lost more and more time to them, the hours between passing in a daze. He fell asleep in a class, falling clean out of his chair, and woke up in the nurses's office to be sent back to his dorm room with a prescription for sleeping tablets.

  
  


Keith takes two on that first night and sleeps for fifteen hours.

  
  


He takes them with him when he leaves the Garrison for the last time, but they don't last long in the desert. The land is sickeningly flat, all the way to the dunes and rocky mountains that rise in the distance, and it fills Keith with a chest-deep, broad-shoulder-wide longing that keeps his eyes on those far-off shapes long after the sun sets and they have ceased to be visible.The pharmacy in the nearby town won't refill the prescription when it runs out, and Keith isn't going back to the Garrison, so he returns with a weaker version that can be purchased over the counter, and he bunks down when it grows dark and it begins anew until Keith knows each of his nightmares like old friends.

  
  


Shiro dies in each of them.

  
  


Sometimes the ship, the Trista III, doesn't make the landing onto the moon, and the crew is killed instantly. Sometimes there is a malfunction and Keith watches Shiro's last moments pass like hours in frightening technicolour. Once or twice the crew is abducted by aliens, and Shiro is killed protecting the Holts, trying to escape, the scenario in these dreams rarely stays the same, but Keith wakes after each one inexplicably angry, filled with impotent frustration and on the third time he breaks a knuckle punching the walls. And sometimes – the dreams not beginning until Keith hears of a memorial service being held at the Galaxy Garrison some six months after the Trista III's signal was last seen – sometimes Shiro dies by Keith's hand.

  
  


Keith isn't sure when the dreams turned inwards, but he goes from desperately trying to stop Shiro bleeding out, to being the one holding the knife.

  
  


Sometimes it's an accident; they slip, or he's trying to remove it from the wound too soon. Shiro doesn't remember him in some dreams and Keith wakes with screams ringing in his ears and the image of himself reaching for the dagger he wears and plunging it deep into Shiro's abdomen – a technique Shiro himself had taught him, the moment now seeming almost unreachably far in the past – burned into his retinas. Sometimes Shiro mortally wounds him first, but mostly Keith wakes with the memory of only phantom cuts and bruises and his hands itching with blood that isn't there.

  
  


Every single time he wakes he wakes to a cold bed and the suffocating knowledge that Shiro is dead, and that he might never know how or why, but always that Shiro is dead and he isn't coming home, and Keith doesn't even have a body to bury and somehow that's the worst and best part because Shiro loved Earth, but he loved space more, and Keith thinks this as he listens to the Garrison memorial on his shitty old radio, the first time he sees the gravestones marked out in the desert, and he feels sick, he feels sick, and the grief burns through him like anger as he claws at the sand. Shiro would never have been content to be grounded, this Keith knows, knows it like he knows that Shiro isn't coming home, and that after three days without sleep you can be declared legally insane. That sleep deprivation is a form of torture, and that he is doing this to himself.

  
  


Keith is gone from the grave site by the time the sun's first rays crests the horizon, leaving just a hole in the sand and shards of stone. A wind picks up, and by the time the sun has climbed over the dunes the ground is flat once more; like nothing was ever there at all.

  
  


That night Keith goes to bed when the first stars appear and he sleeps like the dead.

  
  


*

  
  


When Keith wakes again, it is to bright lights that bathe everything in purple hues, and a headache that makes him squeeze his eyes shut against them.

  
  


He uncurls as much as he can from his position on his side, and he is surprised to feel that he is able to do so. Opens his eyes again and takes in the room around him. He is lying on a stretcher, or the Galra equivalent, he supposes, and when he looks around, the room itself is all clean metal surfaces and locked cabinets, small pill bottles peering at Keith from behind the glass doors. He sits up slowly and when he realises nothing is restraining him, he moves to the edge of the stretches and lowers himself to the floor.

  
  


Keith's legs wobble at the first hint of weight, but they hold and he crosses the room at an uneven pace, stumbling forwards and to the side now and then as he reaches out for handholds. He skins both palms when he falls, feels his knees bruise from the impact, pulls himself up in the same movement and staggers for the door. It's in this moment, exposed to the cooler air in the corridor, that he is entirely naked..

  
  


This doesn't bother Keith as much as he had thought it might have, and he sweeps the room once more for clothes, finding an array of dark clothing in various sizes in a bin in the far corner of the room. It takes some rummaging, but he finds some trousers and a shirt that are close enough to his size not to fall off when he walks.

  
  


He isn't sure where he is heading when he finally leaves the little room, but his feet don't falter and Keith lets himself run on autopilot just this once. He meets no resistance, no patrols, but suspicion escapes him; there, but when he reaches for that part of his mind it vanishes, smoke through his fingers, and Keith can't bring himself to care too much after that. He loses track of direction somewhere around the fourth corner he takes, but Keith is calm, and there is a warm static in the back of his mind that beckons him closer and closer until, teetering on the edge, he lets himself free-fall into the void beyond.

  
  


*

  
  


One by one, the other prisoners are lead out of the cell.

  
  


Shiro watches as the door opens, closes, and opens again, the intervals irregular. Not that he's counting. He could be the only one left, or there could still be others, huddling in the far corner, but Shiro hears nothing over his own breathing, the beating of his heart, and he lets the silence come over him. When he thinks, he sees a spectrum of colours, of red up close and personal, blue-grey smokey galaxies, and it hurts, and it hurt, it hurts, and so Shiro blanks his mind and he doesn't think at all.

  
  


The cell door opens again. Shiro doesn't move, and doesn't look up.

  
  


He is aware of someone approaching, coming to stand in front of him, and when he inclines his head upwards he meets golden yellow eyes as the back of his head touches the wall.

 

He is aware of someone approaching, coming to stand in front of him, and when he inclines his head upwards he meets golden yellow eyes as the back of his head touches the wall.

  
  


A hand breaches his personal space and Shiro lets it happen; if it's his own mind that breaks him then so be it. Better than the Druids, better than Haggar, or anything else Galran. Shiro has spent the last year letting someone else dictate his life but no more, no more, and he will choose this time, once more, and-

  
  


The hand closes on his upper arm, and it's smaller than Shiro is used to, lacks claws, and when Shiro jerks out of the grip, he breaks it.

  
  


Shiro chances a look up, meets the umber of the other's eyes and looks beyond to see pupil and iris defined in saffron and sand, and he knows that Galra eyes have none of this, he knows this for a fact, though the memory of this knowledge escapes him. Sometimes speaks, the sound low and soft, and Shiro is aware they are speaking English, but he can't make out the words themselves. It seems unimportant.

  
  


The person shakes him. It's not important.

  
  


Then one word breaks the surface and sinks down deep to seat itself beside Shiro and on the repeat he clutches at it. Three syllables and a lifetime almost forgotten, overlooked, and Shiro wants, the feeling strange, alien to his body now, but his skin burns for it, and he feels his heart press up against his ribs like a caged animal.

  
  


“Takashi,”

  
  


There is only one person in this universe that says his name like that; the pronunciation about right but the accent all wrong, and his throat aches with recognition.

  
  


“ _ Keith _ ,”

  
  


And everything will somehow be alright, and Shiro knows this for a fact.

 

**Author's Note:**

> DUN DUN DUN.


End file.
